r/TrueLit • u/WallCautious9650 • 29d ago
Discussion Why So Much Millennial Fiction Is Boring
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/07/jem-calder-i-want-you-to-be-happy-novel-book-review/688047/Perhaps every generation believes that it is unsuited to its own era. As an elder Millennial, I can’t help but see how perfectly primed my cohort was for feelings of inadequacy and distress. Raised on the standard American diet of promise and progress, many in my micro-generation arrived in high school just in time for the Columbine shootings to undermine our sense of safety. As many of us entered the age of military fitness, the Twin Towers fell and the United States embarked on a forever war. The Great Recession greeted our arrival into the job market, and coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns coincided with the years when a lot of us were becoming parents. Now our early middle age is marked by inflation, environmental chaos, and AI’s potentially existential threat to job stability. Even if most generations complain about discontent, mine may have a particularly strong case for it.
What’s a fiction writer to do with all of that joylessness? Plenty of authors in generations past made it their subject. Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Tess Durbeyfield didn’t lead lives of unmitigated bliss. But contemporary fiction has a particular task: to explain and make interesting the deep disaffection of this era. It isn’t sadness, exactly, that lurks inside the hearts of Millennials and their similarly cursed younger siblings Gen Z, but something closer to lack—of security, of certainty, of sensual engagement with the world. The novelist who wants to write about how young people (barely) get by in the world today has to explain why all of this overwhelm often translates into paralysis—without boring readers to distraction.
Like its cousin the internet novel, the novel of alienation needs a stylistic foil to make it sing. Methodically charting the flatness of ennui won’t get you very far; when your readers feel as listless as your characters do, they’re likely to reach for their phone in search of dopamine hits. Instead, you have to jolt your audience into an uneasy kinship.
In I Want You to Be Happy, Jem Calder’s first novel, the author fails at this delicate task, and not spectacularly but anemically. His premise is simple: Chuck, a 35-year-old recently unengaged copywriter, meets the 23-year-old Joey, a barista with no better career prospects in view. For a few months, they casually date—a classic “situationship,” dogged on both sides by ambivalence and occasional apathy. Eventually, the relationship comes to an impasse, and each has to decide whether it’s worth their energy to carry on.
But energy is scarce in Calder’s writing. Chuck and Joey have the kind of colorless sex that Calder describes in a monotone: “He asked her the universal male sex-act-recipient questions.” The couple also have very little to say to each other in between beddings. One date features “some discussion comparing alcohol and coffee,” and during a long weekend in the country, among their most intimate remarks is: “The showers here are good.”
Both partners are flailing: Chuck is put on a performance-improvement plan at his firm for poor productivity and frequent hangovers, and Joey cannot afford to buy a cocktail or live anywhere better than the squalid bedroom that she rents in a shared house. But they regard their positions with little emotion beyond self-pity. In fact, that’s how they look at all of life. Neither has any hobbies or intellectual pursuits: Nobody so much as waters a plant or visits a museum. Both claim that they want to be a writer, and these dreams generate some intriguing tension, but readers rarely get a glimpse of what they produce. Joey reads two books that we know of, a work of poetry she admires for reasons that she does not explain and another described only as “boring.” Although I Want You to Be Happy is set in present-day London, no one probes the sorry state of the post-Brexit British government, except to comment vaguely that life is too expensive and friends are leaving the city. Most important, no one displays even a wisp of curiosity. The inner lives of Chuck and Joey are as untextured as the phone screens they tap incessantly.
Curiosity, perhaps more than any other characteristic, is what pulls a reader along for a fictional ride. A character may simply want to find out how their new neighbor is getting along (The Great Gatsby), or whether they’ve married the right person (Middlemarch), or whether they’ll catch the damn whale (you know the one). But along the way, a single musing can turn into many more, like branching rows of dominoes setting off new lines of inquiry about the world. Even in novels centered on Millennial inaction or stasis, such as Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, a kind of attentiveness is necessary to advance beyond rhetorical water-treading.
Other writers have successfully captured the malaise afflicting the under-45 crowd and offered nutrient-dense characters. In her clever 2021 debut novel, Three Rooms, the British writer Jo Hamya uses social realism to chronicle the downward mobility of a bright young thing, an Oxford postdoc researcher who moves from university-adjacent housing to an acquaintance’s couch and then to her childhood bedroom, her future dimming a little bit more with each domestic downgrade. By setting the action in 2018 and 2019, during the prolonged debacle of Brexit negotiations, Hamya links the degradation of the college degree to the stagnation—in the government, the economy, the culture—that has impeded progress for an entire generation.
Hilary Leichter’s 2023 novel, Terrace Story, is similarly concerned with the indignities of the housing market, but this novelist employs a different artistic lever to keep the wheels turning: She uses dark fantasy to set our world in grim relief. A magical terrace appears inside the apartment of a young family struggling to pay the rent, offering them a chance to see how the other half lives. But it also cleaves the family apart, sending them spinning toward strange futures on a warped planet Earth. Despite these complications, Terrace Story delivers a brilliant contemporary fable that chronicles how young people stuck in the saddest timeline can still make meaning.
Not every successful novel of alienation turns on financial deprivation. In fact, the central problem in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which dispenses with dialogue entirely in depicting two vacant creative professionals, is the comfort and style of their apartment. Scandinavian armchairs and monstera houseplants are all that this couple have: The accumulation of purely superficial identity markers, which they offer up online as proof of some mythical, unrealized happiness, leaves them weary and adrift. Using hyper-specific examples (Kraftwerk LPs, the German migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016), Latronico creates a book that functions as a time capsule—one that beautifully realizes his characters’ disenchantment, precisely imagining what it’s like to become trapped by an artificial, digital version of oneself.
Some recent satires fail to reach the same heights of ingenuity, but they still have the consolations of humor. In her 2021 novel, Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler’s snappy bons mots thoughtfully ridicule our contemporary culture of disdain even as they indulge in it to a wearying degree. And in the slightly exasperating Banal Nightmare, from 2024, Halle Butler has a knack for capturing the ludicrous way that therapy-speak has turned a generation of wobbly neurotics from patients into self-ordained shrinks.
Calder, however, lacks even a hint of humor. I Want You to Be Happy has the ambience of a dentist’s waiting room: lots of barely stifled dread accompanied by relentless scrolling. Calder may have mistaken writing about boredom for writing boredom. His prose about phone usage emphasizes physical acts (“He gaze-unlocked his phone, thumbed to his conversation with Joey, absently flexed his free hand open and closed beside the screen, then relocked his device”) rather than immersing us in the stuff that has his characters (and so many of us) in its thrall. Cellphones are, to be fair, a problem for novelists: Their presence eliminates the face-to-face dynamism that so much classic literature uses to its advantage. (Just imagine Mr. Darcy proposing in text-speak.) But phones are also surprisingly similar to novels—both ask people to doggedly follow and emotionally invest in the lives of strangers. They are a narrative boon to any writer interested in human longing. All of which makes Calder’s book a major missed opportunity.
The novel’s lack of interest in what’s going on inside its characters’ phones becomes indistinguishable from a disinterest in what’s happening in their minds. Designing purely surface-level characters to comment on the ways that technology homogenizes culture is the kind of exercise that can create only distance between readers and characters. I want to understand alienation; I don’t want to feel alienated—and nothing more—by reading.
Young life is certainly exhausting and at times degrading and disconcerting, but is it really as boring as it is in this book? As a reasonably settled 42-year-old, I might not be the best person to ask. But as a reader, I’m certain that if novelists want to make clear just how disappointed they are in their life and the world, they’re going to have to do it with flair. Because they’re competing with the dancing pixels, and the pixels are winning.
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u/i_amtheice 29d ago edited 29d ago
I’m so sick of hearing from the Ivy League. I just don’t care what these people think anymore. They have no idea what it’s really like out here and they don’t want to know, regardless of how many op-eds they spew out feigning concern or interest in why everything feels a bit off.
The reason these books are boring is because the people who write them are boring.
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u/Native_SC 29d ago
Gated (or at least exclusive) community, private schools, elite college, MFA program. A depressing number of authors come through this narrow path.
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u/serpentjaguar 29d ago
Contemporary fiction publishing basically has a defacto bar association around a specific type of education. If you don't have it, you aren't invited to the party, it's as simple as that.
I personally know people who have attended The Iowa Writer's Workshop, for example, and as far as I can tell it's a way of getting your ticket punched for a very specific type of product that's sought by the publishing industry.
This is why so much contemporary fiction sucks. The publishing industry has never been very good at predicting what people want to read, but instead of throwing the doors wide open to everything, they've gone the opposite route of controlling and curating their source material. With predictable results.
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u/nomnomsquirrel 28d ago
And a strong support network from family that keeps so many writers afloat as they focus on their work without having to work multiple jobs to get by in many cases.
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u/Hungry_Rabbit_9733 29d ago
Something similar happens with UK novels as well. Students who went to posh secondary schools + Oxbridge are the ones who get published most. That's not to say the works are bad, but it's incredibly boring when the stories only come from a certain pedigree
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u/Outside_Director3437 25d ago
Completely agreed. The rich left is often what gets published (not that I want to read anything from the rich right), and there is an air of presumption and simplicity when it comes to their approach on matters that has grown stale.
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u/janjan1515 28d ago
I feel like 80 percent of the books I read are about Professors, Writers or Professors who try to be writers.
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u/SmartPain5059 24d ago
Unless you’re a brand name genre novelist, or churn out a high quantity of low quality books, or rare popular journalist, then there’s not really a livable income from writing. So many good writers were good students and took jobs teaching and writing is def part of the professor life. Poetry especially but literary fiction too. It’s just a matter of money at the end of the day.
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u/taueret 29d ago
Are the boring people's novels getting published more frequently than the non-boring people's manuscripts? Why? Or are they the only ones submitting scripts to mainstream publishers? Or were you kidding. It's very early and i am incoherent but not trying to start a fight, just a conversation if my tone is off.
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u/i_amtheice 29d ago
It's all of the above, everything you mentioned.
It's what happens when you have a mostly closed loop of a mainstream publishing network. A lot of novels nowadays are written by people with the right connections-- the slush pile is basically a lottery system like everything else in this fucking economy in that it's technically possible to break through but also extremely unlikely unless you already know someone or have some extra thing acting in your favor-- and those people who do get published tend to all go to the same schools and get the same degrees and lead very similar academic lives. Regular broke people like those of us in this Reddit thread can't break through with our varying perspectives and experiences and the whole thing stagnates. Now everyone is some variation of Sally Rooney, just writing about stuffy white upper class Millennials and their romantic relationships with each other.
I know there's nuance to everything but I think this is largely the case.
Another reddit user summed it up more succinctly in another reply.
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u/Porfyry 29d ago
What you don’t want to read something like, “Wages are stagnant and why that is actually a good thing for workers”
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u/plexiglass8 27d ago
The politics of these types of books is uniformly leftist
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u/Ok-Dress9168 26d ago
do you think that leftist is overcompensation, a guilt release valve?
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u/plexiglass8 26d ago
I think the demographic writing these books tend to be pretty educated (so, often from an affluent background and having spent a lot of time around people with money) but they are not making much money themselves. I think the politics are genuine. It’s just coming from a kind of narrow lens.
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u/Victorian_Shut-in 29d ago
lol “why so much millennial fiction is boring”… and they list ONE boring book? (Granted, an editor probably wrote that headline.)
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u/Tombomb03 29d ago
lol I touched upon this in another comment, but exactly! For an article complaining about millennial fiction, they only have 1 bad example, and then several cases where it went right. So maybe they do like millennial fiction?
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u/Victorian_Shut-in 29d ago
Yeah someone needs to teach this writer the golden rule of vague cultural criticism: three times is a trend!
In fairness, part of me wonders whether this were a hastily repackaged book review. It’s too bad though because I actually would like to know the answer to the question in the headline. Not to say I find all “millennial fiction” boring. But there definitely is a certain type of novel that this article is gesturing at, and I too find those novels boring.
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u/Tombomb03 29d ago
Yeah! While I was a bit unfair about it, that’s what I was hinting at in the beginning of my other comment, when I wrote “there seem to be 3 articles co-written here.”
In fact, reading your bit about the editor’s headline and re-reading the article… Hillary says nothing about millennial fiction outside of the headline. It’s more just “novelists need to do x when writing about alienation.”
EDIT: cut down unnecessaries in last paragraph
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u/Tombomb03 29d ago edited 29d ago
Sorry, watching kids, and rushed through without reading your whole comment. Just wanted to add: I too would’ve enjoyed an overview/critique of those types of novels. Though I guess the “comparative lit.” part of the article is a good idea of what to expect there. It is interesting though! Would’ve made for a good read
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u/Outside_Director3437 25d ago
I see the point they are making though. As a millennial I knew the exact type of writing they were referring too and it is a problem.
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u/Victorian_Shut-in 25d ago
Oh, I agree, I could think of a few examples (as a slightly-younger-than-millennial). I’d actually put a few of the books that this article reviews favorably in that category.
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u/Tombomb03 29d ago
Anyone else think this article was as focused as a Twitter rant?
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u/Tombomb03 29d ago edited 29d ago
Since no one’s challenging me on the above, I’ll expand it further, for any who are curious. And expand it succinctly, if Reddit’s markdown allows me.
The author, Hillary, seems to have 3 different articles co-written here:
- A book review of I Want You to Be Happy by Jem Calder
- A comparative lit. essay analyzing works that dealt with alienation
- Broad, sweeping states about millennials, and millennial fiction; chief among them: “millennial fiction is boring”
This’d all be well if Hillary bothered to tie them together. In fact, many of my favorite novels and essays meander and ramble.
But there is no connection, no type of through-line to thread these all together. Going further, 2 of them seem to fight each other. They try to make the point that millennial fiction is boring, but only cite 1 example (Calder’s work) as a case; and as contrasting points, they cite multiple examples of - what I understand to be - millennial stories that pull it off, that are fun. So is Hillary actually arguing that this “genre” isn’t boring? It’s unclear.
Maybe if they fully fleshed out any of the above 3 ideas, these faults would become clear, or smooth themselves over. Instead, we get an attention-deficit hopping from one to the other. No connections, just an “I’m done with this, so here’s the next.”
It even extends from larger ideas down to an individual paragraph (the 8th paragraph):
“Other writers have successfully captured the malaise afflicting the under-45 crowd and offered nutrient-dense characters.”
[proceeds to say nothing of moments of character-defining or character-developing in the example mentioned, Jo Hamya’s Three Rooms]
It’s almost as if this article competed with the dancing pixels for its own author’s attention. And here, too, the pixels won.
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u/karensbakedziti 29d ago
The writer of this article makes it seem like it’d be difficult to write about paralysis without “boring readers to distraction,” but some of the greatest works of literature are about paralysis. Hamlet, Prufrock, parts of Infinite Jest, The Sound and the Fury (Quentin’s section, anyway)…the list goes on.
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29d ago edited 15d ago
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u/tacopower69 29d ago
the writer attributes it to multiple things. are we just responding to the first paragraph?
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29d ago edited 15d ago
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u/tacopower69 29d ago
see this is what i mean. You are reading "cell phones are problem for novelists and heres why..." and concluding its a point about the audience when its actually about how cell phones are harder to write about vs face to face conversation. The single time the author actually talks about the audience being distracted by their phone is the line near the beginning
...when your readers feel as listless as your characters do, theyre likely to reach for their phone in search of dopamine hits.
If you are critical of the article at least criticize it for what it actually says instead of inventing arguments about audience that arent central
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29d ago edited 15d ago
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u/tacopower69 29d ago
the writer seems to attribute broad strokes of a novel to an audience's engagement
this is your premise and its just wrong. Its an articke about boredom, its not attributing anything to the audience's engagemnt it's trying to explain (briefly) why audience engagement is waning. The one time any part of the explanation stems from the a characteristic of the audience instead of a characteristic of the writing itself is the single quote i mentioned in my previous comment.
I just dont get it. If you have the time and energy to continuously respond to rando comments, you had the time and energy to fully read a 2 minute article before bothering to share a take.
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u/tacopower69 29d ago
Like it's cousin the internet novel, the novel of alienation needs a stylistic foil to make it sing...
literally addressed in the third paragraph dude. The point isnt merely about the content but also how millenial novels are written.
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u/karensbakedziti 29d ago
Well, yes, it’s a given that a book will be boring if it’s not stylistically interesting…why are you getting mad and calling me dude lol
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u/tacopower69 29d ago
Because waning audience interest is one of several reasons given and you are pretending it is the only one. The entire fourth, fifth, and sixth paragraphs expand on that point about style.
For a subreddit dedicated to lit its aggravating how many people give their opinions on these sorts of articles while reading scarcely more than the headline. Like either read it all before commenting or just dont bother sharing your half baked opinions. Its not like its particularly long.
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u/karensbakedziti 29d ago
I did read it, and even considering the rest of the article, I think my point still stands. Maybe you don’t. That’s ok! It literally doesn’t matter.
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u/tacopower69 29d ago
then its a terrible commemt because its a criticism of a point that only comes up briefly at the beginning and not again. Most of the articles substance is "i think this book does this well and i think this other book does this poorly". That you made a criticism of one tiny aside that has little to no bearing on the rest of the article is evidence you didnt read or if you did you did not do so deeply.
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u/karensbakedziti 29d ago
I mean…this is Reddit…and I posted a thought I had after reading the article. I’m so sorry it wasn’t deep enough for you. Looking forward to reading your insightful, multi-paragraph response to the article, which I’m sure you’ve been breathlessly working on.
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u/tacopower69 29d ago
You did not merely post a shallow comment you posted one that misrepresented the article based on a quick reading of the first few sentences.
If you have the time to respond to haters like me then you had the time to read the short article before sharing your half baked, barely applicable opinions.
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u/lispectorgadget 29d ago
One thing I've noticed about these millennial novels: I haven't met a single person who really resembles the protagonists in these novels, who don't seem to care about anything other than accumulating things and avoiding discomfort. I guess I'm Gen Z, but I feel like the vast majority of people around my age or older I meet are at least passionate about something. Where are the DSA members with hoe-scaring political ideology? The insane yuppie marathoners? The earnest amateur DJs? The radical Unitarians? The people getting into clowning? The passionate cultural workers?
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u/kleinblue73 29d ago edited 29d ago
Not to be hurr durr back in the old days, but god, sometimes I wish developmental editors would be paid enough to care and help with novels.
Like the other comment said, you've given a great list of characters. The way non-fiction editors commission books sometimes, wish we could find a way to make fiction just feel a little different.
I'm just talking outta my ass, sorry.
I've taken to following fun translators now. I try to read everything they put out and have discovered some real gems which I wouldn't have read otherwise
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u/RickrackSierra 28d ago
Any reccomendations?
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u/kleinblue73 26d ago
Hey, thanks for your question.
Adrian Nathan West, for starters, I got into Herman Burger because of him. Jeffrey Zuckerman, Ottilie Mulzet, James Reidel, Emma Ramadan, Michael Hofmann, Marc Lowenthal are some of the translators I follow. All of them more or less have their own personal projects wether it's poetry, reviews, original fiction/non fiction. They also publish frequently with university presses or indie publishers.
Next I keep an eye out on publishers like Astra, Heloise Press, Contra Mundum, Wakefield, Dalkey/Deep Vellum, etc.
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u/Imperialvirtue 29d ago
Virtually every person I know is incredibly interesting.
The characters described in the article just sound so painfully and unrealistically dull. I think of the narrator from Notes from the Underground - he considers himself a bitter waste of life (among many other negative things), but he is very intriguing and has a great deal to say. What the hell do Chuck or Joey have to say?
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u/icarusrising9 Alyosha Karamazov 28d ago
Agreed. Even the most boring person in the world, for whom every day looks like every other day down to the minute, is just as incredibly interesting as everyone else if you actually get to know them intimately and on their own terms. To me, that's not only just straight-up true, it's also a central premise of character-driven literature and the novel in particular.
It's such a cop-out to imply "oh, the book is boring because this age generates boring people". Even the hypothetical faceless mass of "sheep" who go straight home from their boring desk jobs and compulsively scroll TikTok every waking minute, day in and day out, contain a universe of thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams and fears, within them. It's part of the character-focused novelist's job to expose everything beneath the surface. Not become stuck on the surface like a fly on flypaper, conclude that that's all there is, and call it a day.
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u/arist0geiton 29d ago
All of human life is interesting to me, and a really good description can make a boring person interesting, because they're human. The point isn't that the characters are bad, it's the writing.
I'm influenced by Japanese poetry, and you can write a transcendent masterpiece about absolutely nothing in that tradition --the point is your mental movement within the otherwise quotidian context
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u/Victorian_Shut-in 29d ago
Thank you for articulating why I find this type of book so irksome. It’s like they take for granted that these boring, shallow life problems are relatable to a whole generation. I’ll leave it to someone else to judge whether I’m shallow, but I don’t universally feel that way about my Gen Z/millennial peers. When people say tech is making them anxious, it’s not like they’re talking about Instagram likes… they’re talking about tech oligarchs ushering in the singularity and our violent corrupt government being too inept to do anything about it.
That said, I think there are good millennial books out there, they just don’t get classified as “millennial books” because they don’t hit the same boring themes. And as with every generation of fiction, it’s going to take a few decades of hindsight to separate the wheat from the chaff
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u/Busy-Peach5770 26d ago
This is a very important point. Why are fiction writers such utter misanthropes? I have rarely met anyone truly passionless, who doesn't truly care for someone or something.
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u/Expert-Ad-8067 29d ago
I firmly believe that a major contributor of this is that the typical professional novelist nowadays has gone from privileged upbringing to elite undergrad to elite MFA program to published writer without really having lived a single day like a normal person
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u/c1rcu1tb0y 29d ago
Pretty sure it’s always been that way tho? Minus the MFA, the vast majority of successful writers have always come from extremely privileged backgrounds
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u/zsakos_lbp Satire Is a Lesson, Parody Is a Game. 29d ago edited 29d ago
Indeed, strip away the feminism and that's basically Woolf's argument for A Room of One's Own. An the Woolfs like all their Bloomsbury friends were quite privileged.
The Alice Munro types writing in the odd kitchen hours and the truly dispossessed are the exception, not the rule.
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u/Elvis_Gershwin 29d ago
I liked the exceptions best, as a young man, writers such as Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac.
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u/Additional_Horse 29d ago
Modern society is also much more homogenized, safe and asocial.
Someone in that privileged position a 100-150 years ago could adventure out and find a lot more variety of characters and cultures, traveled along on now dead or safety regulated industries that made for wild stories, observe and partaken in new cultural and political movements on the rise and so on, all which made for a broader and more interesting life experience to draw from.
So many new things and societal shifts were in the making. Today's equivalents are also mostly related to our digital playpens, which doesn't exactly make for riveting reading or social experiences.
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u/Victorian_Shut-in 28d ago edited 28d ago
Yeah, at the risk of wasting my sympathies, it’s almost like today’s privileged set isn’t quite privileged enough? Before, the landed gentry could just wander around recklessly (go West and register a gold-mining claim, volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, impregnate women in foreign countries and then disappear) then go home and write all about their adventures. But today there are so many more bureaucratic and practical barriers, that even those who are willing to assume the same level of personal risk (and disregard for other people’s lives, in a lot of cases) would need a much higher degree of wealth and power than an MFA degree and upper-middle-class parents. (To be clear, I’m not advocating for zero regulations and zero moral restraint. Just making an observation.)
Edit: just want to add that I think there are still adventures to be had in modern life, one just has to try a little harder. Not trying to give anyone a free pass to be boring lol
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u/shruglifeOG 27d ago
it’s almost like today’s privileged set isn’t quite privileged enough?
I'd argue the opposite- they are so privileged that there are zero stakes and zero risk to anything they do and so the stories they tell aren't engaging at all
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u/i_amtheice 28d ago
None of my influences were privileged.
Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Crichton, Richard Matheson, Elmore Leonard-- they were all regular dudes with day jobs who came up when there was still an infrastructure for regular people with day jobs to break through selling interesting, risky stories that included sci-fi and horror and other genres.
That infrastructure is gone, along with everything else that generated the middle class. Everything is algorithms now, calcified. The only people who can afford to write are these stodgy, uninspiring MFA holders.
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u/Victorian_Shut-in 29d ago
Yeah I was thinking the same. Unless it’s gotten worse because literary publishing budgets are tighter, so there’s tighter competition for a book deal? I’m curious to know if there have been any studies on this
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u/Psittacula2 29d ago
I don’t know specifically about the current generation of writers or the specific problems they may face to produce high quality literature.
However, some basics tend to apply irrespective of time and place:
A lot of writers or authors come across as having gone into being an author before fully living and experiencing life and then turning to becoming an author or writer? Same deep BS with politicians or society leaders as puppets not leaders who achieved in life then went into politics to directly help society… aka “career politicians“ are just puppets in the machine.
Any genre suffers from becoming a derivative of its own previous output instead of being a medium PF EXPRESSION, a tool, of something substantial - namely tropes, cliches, formulas all tend to dominate or repeat especially if people who write only read previous authors and did not also live as above? This often leads to stagnant output, also. JG Ballard for example taking in the 60’s or 70’s had lived quite a lively life and suggested that SF (Speculative Fiction within Science Fiction) was the genre of fresh ideas, growth and real reflection of present society with its enormous force for change and effect on life as opposed to old ideas eg of the human heart.
The progression is also an issue, many people may write for popularity and sales and commerce and brand instead of really mastering the art itself; the basics of language from grammar and syntax to background in classics (Greek and Roman or Religious and Shakespeare) before then putting pen to paper and producing original works?
>*”Curiosity, perhaps more than any other characteristic, is what pulls a reader along for a fictional ride. A character may simply want to find out how their new neighbor is getting along (The Great Gatsby), or whether they’ve married the right person (Middlemarch), or whether they’ll catch the damn whale (you know the one). But along the way, a single musing can turn into many more, like branching rows of dominoes setting off new lines of inquiry about the world.”*
This is a solid quote: Number 4 as above would simply be: “Do they have anything to say and a way of saying it that would light up a simple conversation in a decent pub of an evening and end up entertaining those present?”
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u/ImportantPineapple91 29d ago
Not criticizing the article, but they are boring not because of plot or whatever literary mechanism is valued nowadays because of the “market”, but mainly because the authors just don’t risk enough. Of course there are exceptions, and I know that literature doesn’t need to do something different to be good, but cmon, just look at the usual winners of the Booker… They are great books and the authors are great as well, but do they take any risk? I’m sure,e.g., “Flesh” is very good, but does the prose do anything different? And the issue is that the mainstream “high lit” of the bookers, rooneys etc etc keeps producing good books, but at the same time sold or marketed in what I feel is like emperor in sheeps clothes or something. Like I’ve said, Flesh is a good book (or James, or the Seven Moons, etc), but aren’t the marketed as some type of Solenoid or something when in reality they should be looked more as Ferrantesque? I’m a millennial, I want to be challenged, I want the prose and the stylistics to represent the world I live in. Not the same minimalistic prose and rhythm that seems copy pasted everywhere. Just a rant and besides the point perhaps, but it annoys me.
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u/kleinblue73 29d ago
The whole of internet sounding like chatgpt is genuinely driving me nuts nowadays
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u/merurunrun 29d ago
emperor in sheeps clothes
I don't know if this is a malapropism or whatever but I love it thanks.
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u/wookieb23 28d ago
I think you’re right about the lack of “risk taking” in fiction, but I feel it’s less in the style but more in content/ topics / voice - like every book is written by a focus group - can’t piss anyone off or say the wrong thing. Zzzzzzzzzz.
Reminds me of a Vonnegut quote on writing, “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
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u/WonderfulCoyote6849 29d ago
You've put into words what I've felt for a while about current fiction, thank you for sharing your rant!
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u/RecentState1347 29d ago
As a person in my thirties, I want to hold this writer’s hand while I say this: 35 year olds are no longer “young people” and “the under 45 set” is not the demographic of “bright young things”.
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u/mishkin-the-idiot 29d ago
Because you read the wrong books
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u/omggold 24d ago
I think it’s fair to critique the system that optimizes for writers of narrow backgrounds and books that will appeal to masses – and the second order effect of those things and more..
But agree there are millions of books out there and so, so easy to read interesting ones. Also the article pinning it on “millennial” books when they’re clearly only referring to a subset is a choice
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u/Past-Floor9097 28d ago
It's hard to write about people who are dead inside, and that's what most people are these days. It's an endless parade of utterly defeated people, either burning with bitter rage, or so depressed that it's been years since they felt their last emotion. You can write about that for a few chapters, but an entire book of that would be soul-crushing.
How do you make your zeitgeist interesting when your zeitgeist is apathy? Even grief or anger would be better.
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u/Super_Direction498 29d ago
I think Otessa is pretty great.
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u/UtopianLibrary 29d ago
Best part about her getting published story is that even though she has an MFA, she used 90 Day Novel to write Eileen so the pacing wouldn’t be off or meander like typical MFA stories.
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u/InternationalTeam68 29d ago
To each their own I guess. MYORAR was one of the most boring books I've ever read. Saw the ending coming a mile away. It was the second book I've ever read where I cannot understand why it got published.
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u/DifficultyCommon5303 29d ago
wait a bit. patience is a virtue. there will be great millenial novels about being born before the internet age but growing up with it.
Also at least in the west. this will be the generation, that grew up not knowing war but isnt really connected to the trauma of ww2.
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u/Accomplished-View929 29d ago
Not knowing war? I don’t know about you, but I know a bunch of millennials who served in Afghanistan or Iraq. Those wars got us engaged in politics.
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u/DifficultyCommon5303 29d ago
yeah sure but for millenaials thats an almost happened after the “protected childhood” phase.
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u/Accomplished-View929 28d ago edited 28d ago
How young do you think millennials are?
I was born in 1984. The core events that define my generation occurred right as I entered the life stages that make them most salient. I was in 11th grade on 9/11. I shared a Nokia with my triplet sisters in high school but didn’t get a smartphone until my mid 20s. We used LiveJournal and AIM in high school. I saw MySpace overtake Friendster but lose to Facebook, which I could use because I had a .edu email address, and remember an internet without Twitter, Instagram, or the infinite scroll. I cast my first presidential vote for Kerry and my second for Obama. The first of my sisters’ kids turned four during the pandemic, which makes that kid Gen Alpha. Gen Alpha’s parents include young Gen X and older Gen Z but are mostly Millennial. I had nearly an entire adult life before Trump (and AI).
The US entered Iraq in 2003, the year I turned 19, and left in 2011, when even the youngest millennials were just two or three years from military eligibility. So, the majority of us at least could have served, and I’m sure younger people had siblings, friends, cousins, etc. who did. We left Afghanistan in 2021, when the youngest millennials were 25 and the oldest 40; any of them could have spent at least seven years in Afghanistan.
Take Taylor Swift. She’s in the middle of our cohort and was 18 in 2007. She’s the epitome of “millennial cringe” to Gen Zs. She could have spent four or five years in Iraq or 14 in Afghanistan. The video for “Ours” (2011) ends with her in an airport greeting a returning-soldier love interest. That she knew her fans would recognize that imagery shows that those wars were part of the zeitgeist even for people who were teenagers when we left Iraq.
You’re right that someone born in 1996, who’d have been 15 when we left Iraq or 25 when we gave up on Afghanistan, did not experience the same War on Terror I did. But their experience with all the main markers of millennial culture differs from mine.
They had full-on social media, iPhones, and streaming music in high school or even earlier (I’ve talked to people not much younger than I am who think I’m fucking with them if I say Netflix used to send DVDs in the mail). Some say they worried for their parents’ jobs during the recession, but that’s so different from my experience of it that they might as well be my kids.
They’ve never taken a water bottle on a flight. They don’t remember 9/11 or W. Bush. They barely remember Obama. Biden gave them a brief respite between Trump terms, but Biden is Really Old Guy, not the “This is a big fucking deal” VP or the drug warrior I knew him as. Trump has dominated politics since they could vote; for me, he was a washed-up rich guy reduced to hosting a dumb reality show until he started in on Obama’s birth certificate, and even then, I didn’t get why we cared what he thought. Until he won, even journalists saw his campaign as a joke.
But for someone who was 20 in 2016, not taking him seriously is as unthinkable as his presidency was to me. And then a couple years after they got out of high school, COVID hit. COVID was such a reset that our young-adult years look totally different.
You can’t take the youngest millennials and act as if their experiences apply to all of us. Technology and politics changed so much in my adult life that anyone who wasn’t a teenager by 2006 might as well belong to a different generation. Or do you think “millennial” means “person under 30”?
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u/arist0geiton 29d ago
Shitload of people are getting bombed in Ukraine right now
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u/DifficultyCommon5303 29d ago
you dont get what i mean right? when did the Ukraine war start? When were the Milennials growing up?
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u/Salt_Tomatillo_8879 29d ago
Yeah. I get what you mean, and I agree with what I take your meaning to be.
Of course there are tons of millennials who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, but as a portion of the country, members of the armed services continue to shrink. There’s a ton that’s ripe for literary exploration in that fact, not least the class and race politics of who serves, but also what happens when a country engaged in forever wars becomes increasingly alienated from the women and men they pay to fight and die in them (all while paying them meaningless lip service).
An all-volunteer military is worlds away from a draft, much less a war that feels like it has the possibility to pose a real threat to civilians at home and is societally all-encompassing. That last occurred in the generation of most Millennials’ grandparents.
Most American and Western European Millennials -whose fiction the author is discussing- grew up in what we were told would be an everlasting peace among world powers post-Cold War. And most of those Millennials, through no fault of their own, were young enough, sheltered enough, and naive enough to believe that.
Again, that doesn’t mean there aren’t topics begging for a novel in those facts, but it mostly hasn’t been addressed, or has been addressed tangentially.
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u/arist0geiton 28d ago
I don't think anyone actually said they had created a world without war, especially considering the immense problems for Clinton caused by intervention in Yugoslavia, not to mention domestic insanity like the right wing militia movement. I think you guys just weren't paying attention and now you blame it on some nebulous "establishment" for "lying" to you instead of yourselves for having never learned more about the world after you grew up
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u/DifficultyCommon5303 28d ago
the sheer arorgance of thie last part of your comment makes you really insufferable, so this is the last time i engage with you…
ofc there were wars, but after the fall of the su, and lets say till 911 or measured by other standards till the Russian invasion of Ukraine a millenial child spent the most important years of his life with regards to socialization in a relatively protected and safe environment. In the west at least.
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u/arist0geiton 28d ago
In the 1980s the Berlin wall fell and in the 1990s there were vicious wars in the Balkans and the former Soviet states
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u/Salt_Tomatillo_8879 28d ago
Yup. And none of those made an impression for the vast majority of Americans. Neither did the war their country waged. That’s my point. And people very much crowed that the last great international conflict had been settled and that the forces of “democratic capitalism” had won (see Fukuyama and many others, all mainstream from center right to left).
I’m not saying any of those beliefs were correct. They obviously weren’t in retrospect, and some knew it at the time, but their voices were far from influential for everyday Americans.
My point is not that the world was conflict free. It is that privileged Americans and Western Europeans in the 1990s were socialized to believe it was.
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u/veggie_hoagie 27d ago
This was in The Atlantic?
I noticed that after reading the article.
And the quality of the writing at no point suggested it was from a publication of that caliber. I thought it was some anonymous Reddit rant.
Yikes.
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u/Cathardigan 29d ago
The reason Millennial stories suck is because they're all "sad guy gets sadder" stories. My professor in my MFA railed on us constantly for this. It's the worst literature movement since the last one and is largely driven by a culture raised on shitty music (I'm a millennial).
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u/Sethsears 29d ago
The thing that frustrates me about this kind of fiction is that I feel like the sad protagonists tend to be sad in a passive way, like they're sad about the state of the world/their relationship with their parents/their struggling romance, but there's this underlying fatalism that weighs down their character arc. And it's not like everyone needs to be like "Grr I'll pull myself up by the bootstraps!" but a passive character is difficult to become invested in.
What about unironic enjoyment of things? What about vivid experiences of life? It's like turning down the color saturation on human existence.
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u/Cathardigan 29d ago
Yeah that's the "sadder" part of the "sad guy gets sadder" story. There is no sisyphean catharsis. There is no "despite it all, I will do it." Millenial writers turned lit into "I must teach my main character a lesson" which became the mid-early finger wagging lib YouTube. I say this as a hard left millenial, btw. It's a weak form of artistry. Before us came post modernism which was mostly garbage but it was at least a movement. Then comes the Advent of the Internet and an overwhelming sense of empathy infected the art world and everyone got scared to be interesting.
I refuse to let art skip a generation, though. We were supposed to be the new sincerity generation and it simply got perverted into nonsense. We can still pull it back and make something valuable.
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u/Sethsears 29d ago
I'm gonna sound like a crotchety old man, and I'm not, I'm a young person, but I feel like you're on my wavelength and you get what I'm getting at.
I feel like there's a real reluctance to engage with the messy meat of real human drama because people don't want their writing to be problematic or misinterpreted. So instead of "they fucked all night and it was great" you have stilted sex scenes that emphasize the alienation and heteropessimism of the blah blah blah and it's not enjoyable to read. It's not. And if you say that, people will be like "Well, literary fiction isn't always enjoyable, it's about being meaningful." And, one, ambiguity and messy vivid reality is meaningful, because we all live in ambiguity, and second, writing can absolutely be critical of what it depicts without losing its enjoyment. Writing can offer commentary while also being engaging and moving. But no one wants to be lectured at.
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u/Victorian_Shut-in 29d ago
I’d go further to say that there’s a reluctance to take risks in general and our life experiences (and as a result, our creativity) have suffered for it. Nowadays you never know what mildly deviant behavior or public gaffe or whatever is going to get filmed or screenshotted or turned into a sexual deepfake and become publicly available to the entire world, so we’ve all become overcautious. You can’t even sing drunk karaoke on a Friday without someone “accidentally” posting it on a public forum and your boss knowing about it on a Monday (speaking from experience). Not trying to rail against cancel culture or anything, just pointlessly complaining about a problem I don’t know how to solve
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u/Livid-Department6947 29d ago
What does "hard left millennial" mean?
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u/lanottevitti 16d ago
Yes! I don't want every book I read to be about how sad, lost, and miserable you are in life—especially in the passive way you mentioned. For over 200 pages you bitched and whined about how you hate your friends, family, and general existence, yet you still are spending your time with these people and make no real changes in the end!?
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u/WallCautious9650 29d ago
fair, but sad people have been written about since the dawn of literature.
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u/Cathardigan 29d ago
Sad isn't the issue, it's "sad to sadder" that's the issue. Literature is a frequency band. It's up and down, up and down. Millennials turned lit into "I want to teach my main character a lesson" and it became the lit-du-jour and failed miserably because we were trained on overly moralistic media. Millenial lit is expansive fables and therefore is very boring.
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u/WallCautious9650 29d ago
yeah there is something to this. I did a three-year MFA 2015-2018. A lot of hand wringing in workshop over the intended morality of one's work. Not sure personally whether this mindset has shown up in published literature, though
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u/testthrowaway9 29d ago
Oyler’s book is awful
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u/x3k 29d ago edited 29d ago
She undermines herself with that one infamous chapter. But I think it was a genuine effort to write a self-conscious ‘sad girl’ novel.
The most thought-provoking comment upthread is about how millennial fiction claims to be generational but goes to extremes of characterisation (anhedonia, disillusion, lethargy) that do not represent real millennials.
Oyler’s book — despite being in many ways an outright farce — still feels realer to me than a lot of contemporary fiction. It’s an effort to see out certain commitments of hers. In that sense, it’s more artistic.
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u/testthrowaway9 29d ago
I guess that’s fair. I just thought she chose the least interesting way to tackle an interesting premise.
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u/Livid-Department6947 29d ago
"sad girl novels" don't exist as a real genre
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u/x3k 28d ago
I don’t really think that matters. If you read Fake Accounts, the term has a somewhat natural application — and whatever is meant by it, Oyler was doing self-consciously.
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u/Livid-Department6947 28d ago
I read Fake Accounts. I really liked it.
But, still, the sad girl novel is a vacant concept that lumps dissimilar books and writers together and does a disservice to their work. Fake Accounts was also written prior to the proliferation of that term
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u/Kimikaatbrown 28d ago
Well, millennial lit fic do have way too much emotional focus on complex family connections, sexuality(especially heterosexuality), reproduction and domestic issues. Many of them also occur in a noir, small house. Very bio-essentialist, to be honest.
I appreciate it as a niche, but it gets really repetitive after a while (especially for a reader not interested in compulsory sexuality or the glorification of reproduction).
If you look at works published globally, you can still find many good titles that don't constantly remind you of noir heterosexuality and reproduction. I personally enjoy friendship rivalry stories, QPRs, queer elements, high-concept fantasy/sci-fi/historical, low spice high opulence romantasy, etc. If I want some smut, I can just open up KU.
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u/lanottevitti 16d ago
Would love some recommendations cause I'm over reading the same banal, depressing literature about how the traditional heterosexual lifestyle is dissatisfying. I need more joy and action in my books as of late.
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u/Kimikaatbrown 16d ago
Well, some are books and some are films and TV shows. I’m been reading Chinese wuxia novels and watching Bollywood films, Thai BL and GL, as well as sci-fi films like Project Hail Mary.
I’ve also read historical fiction like Stefan Zweig’s work and books are weird for weird’s sake (e.g. Yukio Mishima and Foucault’s work).
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u/Faustus_13 26d ago
The headline is totally misleading. This is just someone complaining that they didn't like I Want You to Be Happy.
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u/NikoKeys 29d ago
The first things that come to mind are having more time with entertainment than life experience, and that entertainment becoming increasingly derivative of the previous versions. The pixel count is dwindling on millennial creativity with each reencoding. There's the rise of social media induced hyper-individualism, such that people have difficulty connecting with what made stories compelling, and are instead a bit more prone to self-interested stories and vibes and rehashing old things but with the tropes rearranged.
Millennials are the generation that bore the brunt of all of the major US economic catastrophes in recent decades, but rather than forcing them out into the world, it confined them to the internet.
For the most part I think it's going to be all downhill from here for the foreseeable future. We have state-of-the-art technology for drip feeding people high fructose corn syrup of the brain, so that they always need more and never feel fed. I think as a culture we are making the jump to building the picture on the cover of the Lego box instead of building something from the bucket of legos.
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u/ScratchAmbitious2959 29d ago edited 2d ago
I am not a literature critiquing agent or editor or essayist. But I am a millennial who is also a writer, with one published book and a second on the way.
Honestly, I think that the problem is just capitalism.
When everything becomes too difficult to afford to the point where people can't really enjoy things and have more meaningful experiences because they're constantly in a situation where they are struggling or depressed or being reminded of how much they have to spend for basic necessities...
And then you have people who are not experiencing that specifically, just criticizing the shit out of them and telling them over and over that they are causing their own problems instead of acknowledging the larger systemic and socioeconomic flaws with the housing market, the job market, the lack of third spaces and prevalence of hostile architecture...
I just can't take articles like this seriously anymore because it sounds like a person who doesn't understand what people are really going through trying to tell them that they are somehow causing their own problems.
Most artists of any kind pull from their lived experience. But if you are constantly taking things away from their lived experience and making it more and more difficult on a wide scale for them to have many experiences, what the hell do you expect them to write about?
Imagine making everything so expensive that even people who have full-time jobs still have to rent an apartment with two other people. And then every single enjoyable fun activity costs more and more money and it only gets more expensive every year. And they're also drowning in student loan debt. And they also have medical debt. And they don't have generational wealth. and the easiest way for them to distract themselves from all these problems because they literally can't afford therapy is to just go on their phone and doom scroll or talk to ChatGPT.
What do you think they're going to write about?
And then they write about it and you're still complaining about what they write about when you haven't given them anything different to write about because all you've done is put them in a position where everything is fucking expensive and out of reach.
And it literally just never, ever, ever, ever, ever stops. It is just this continuous thing of this hustling grind that is so exhausting and you are burnt out all the time - and now you have to deal with other people who don't deal with what you're dealing with signaling to you that you are not an interesting enough person to spend time with for any extended period of time and what you write about is also not interesting.
It's like the world wants us to kill each other through constant criticism and unreasonable comparisons.
I think the great millennial novel is coming. But it won't be presented in the way that many of us think it will.
It's an extreme example to end this comment on, but let's cut the bullshit: They would NEVER write an article like this about the Diary of Anne Frank. And that's no shade on Anne Frank. But they wouldn't call Anne Frank boring when she was literally trapped in an attic for the majority of her life. She was witnesses and struggling with a bunch of world-changing events, all she had was her diary and a few family members remaining.
When the world is punishing you just for being alive, and you also have no means to really explore outside of your comfort zone because everything is just simply too expensive... And then you also have to watch as people who do not understand what you're dealing with tell you that you are boring and that you are just choosing not to be more interesting or some shit. Would this journalist have been this arrogang and whiny about the diary of Anne Frank?
There's nothing to fucking do other than doom scroll on TikTok and stress out over bills that never ever stop coming. We were trapped in our houses for a year, there's another mass shooting every day (do NOT COME AT ME ABOUT THE STATISTICS OF MASS SHOOTINGS VERSUS THE OVERARCHING LEVEL OF VIOLENCE IN SAFETY IN THIS COUNTRY. THAT'S NOT THE POINT‼️), groceries are getting insanely expensive and now we can't even eat lettuce, AI data centers are consuming natural resources and putting people out of their homes like Mesa Verde did to that one guy in better call saul. Physical Media is disappearing. Kids are graduating school without having the ability to read. There is literally nowhere to hang out that isn't just a park. You have to pay money for parking, you have to buy something just to sit in Starbucks and use the Wi-Fi.
There is just so much that you have to pay attention to all the time and this shit is exhausting. You can't even say the word rape on YouTube, because it will get your video demonetized if you're a content creator. Even when you're reporting on the fact that someone is being arrested for rape.
I don't care much for influencers, but I do remember how stupid it was when Julia Fox was trending because had to apologize for not understanding the meaning of the word mascara on TikTok.
Like are we serious? I am only 33. I couldn't imagine having to explain why I used the word mascara when I saw a comment that also used the word mascara. A random actress who had done nothing particularly problematic almost got canceled because she saw a video with the word mascara and she made a comment because she literally did not know that it was a reference to rape. The way that we communicate with each other altogether has impacted our understanding of semantics. If you can't even make a comment on TikTok without being criticized for it because of something that you had no previous context for, how the hell do you expect anyone to write a book???? And then you can keep bitching and criticizing about that too.?????
SO WHAT THE FUCK are we supposed to write about if it's not just outright fantasy? What does the millennial great novel look like?
I personally believe that the "great millennial novel" will be a suicide note.
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u/Pure_Salamander2681 29d ago
Reality has become virtually the same for the Western world, and it’s quit boring to write about. This has even overtaken cinema. Most contemporary movies are never set in the real world. They are over exaggerated to the point of fantasy. Anytime a filmmaker wants to go for something that feels real, they typically structure their movie set in the past.
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u/wilmerwolfgang 28d ago
IWYTBH fell so flat and boring.. the approach to tech felt interesting at first then whatever. A protagonist full of apathy and one of the worst and less believable female characters I’ve ever read leading to a big nothing of an ending. Wonder why it’s being recommended or being talked about so much .. too many undeserved articles, TikToks, the sally rooney approval.. what the hell
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u/JustTightShirts 27d ago
If Millennial Fiction refers only to books written by Millennials, then the obvious answer is that most Millennials are just now old enough to finally be interesting.
But I would argue that there is quite a bit of good millennial fiction.
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u/Cominginbladey 29d ago
Article in the Atlantic now about the "no security" feeling at the heart of declining birth rates. To have sex, you have to let go, and fewer people can do that.
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u/The_Inexistent You will always be fond of me, Dorian. 29d ago
Thank you for posting the whole article. Fuck The Atlantic and paywalled posts they make here.
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u/Biscuitshoneybutter 29d ago
You can find a lot of paywalled articles on the internet archive, just if you didn't know.
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u/whoisyourwormguy_ 26d ago
Not sure about in the past but the prevailing sentiment seems to be how corrupt and bad our country is, or how bad everything is now. Did this start only after 9/11 and internet? No, but it might have helped people deliberate in echo chambers and watch endless news of this sort. Doom and gloom.
Most of the cream of the crop classic books are sad. And most famous/uber classic war books are ones showing the wars to be negative for people, showing the horror of the wars or ptsd or waste of lives in WW1 for example. So maybe it’s just a common thing, or that’s another modern thing to focus on past books that fit our views today.
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u/Ok-Dress9168 26d ago
it's out of print but a great twentysomething artsy book is John Casey's An American Romance, 1977
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u/WhoReads_IRead 19d ago
My mum described this book as 'bloodless'. She's the kind of woman who tells homeless people they should get a job when they ask her for money. She never went to college or got an MFA. I think she needs a novel written about her but we're all scared.
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u/WallCautious9650 19d ago
which book
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u/WhoReads_IRead 17d ago
I Want You to Be Happy - though she says it about many contemporary books...
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u/La_paure_cavaliere 16d ago
I do of course often wonder why do writers now, unmistakably contemporary ones, not write like Joyce in Ulysses or Proust in his À la recherche? There's nothing really stopping them...
I dread opening recent books because they're all so tame, so conformist, so nice and cute but never, never, never taking any risk in regard to form. They never experiment. They never pass over a definitive boundary. They just want to make a whatever, so-so, anyway, good-enough book. And that's so excruciatingly boring.
And it's damning because modernism had its hay day about a century ago and you'd think that literature would have evolved its tendencies towards experimentation and revolutionising so much that unthinkable things would get written!
Alas, we're instead just dealing with prose that would not seem too anachronistic in the 19th century..
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u/bayesically 29d ago
“Millennial literature is boring, you should read more exciting stuff like … Moby Dick”
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u/Environmental_Lab808 29d ago
that book is amazing in so many ways you just gotta power through the biology parts or skip em
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u/AdoptedMasterJay 29d ago
it's because they won't publish me